Verite Bites

[Left] Filmmaker Peter Mortimer, hard at work on his upcoming creation, First Ascent.[Filmstrip] Didier Berthod vs. the Cobra—one of North America's most difficult, and most coveted, cracks. [Photo] Peter Mortimer and Sonnie Trotter

Scene: Didier vs. the Cobra

NARRATOR: Didier Berthod, a young Swiss climber, has set out to make the
first ascent of the legendary Cobra Crack, perhaps the hardest
traditional climb ever done.

OPENING SHOT: We see the Cobra Crack—a long, thin line that splits an
overhanging face of weathered granite right through its middle.

ZOOM IN TO THE UPPER HEADWALL: From the bottom of the frame sprout
Didier's chalk-stained fingers. We hear his breathing intensify as he
pulls into the steepening crack. He is trembling with the effort, but
still in control.

ME, UNABLE TO CONTAIN MYSELF BEHIND THE CAMERA: "Come on dude. Come on
dude. Come on dude. Come on dude."

The camera jiggles with excitement, then settles and glides closer as
Didier reaches for the last hard move. We see it before he does: the
final holds glisten from the morning rain. Inches from victory, he
slips... and is off, for a huge whipper.

ME AND DIDIER, IN UNISON: "Aaaaaaaaghhhhh!!!!!"

Welcome to the climbing movie that has become my life.

I came to Canada's Cirque of the Uncrackables in Squamish, B.C., on my
quest to make a film about first ascents, the most exciting and
adventurous of all climbing pursuits. First Ascent was to be (I hoped)
my biggest picture yet: an on-camera journey around the world that
features the pioneers of modern climbing in a wide range of settings and
disciplines. I was extra psyched because Didier, my personal climbing
hero, had set out to make the FA of the Cobra Crack, a climb as elegant
as it is improbable. For my relatively young filming career, it seemed
like an apotheosis: the perfect climber making history on the perfect
climb.

Or it would be, if Didier got up the thing. And I was pretty sure he
would, if it ever stopped raining. I only had about five days left to
shoot the final scene of Didier vs. the Cobra, the all-important
"through-line" story that would stitch together the disparate segments
of the film. But as the movie's suspense became my own, I began to
realize that in real life, if not in movies, perfect things and happy
endings can be elusive.

As often happens, the idea for the current film came while making the
last one. For a scene in Return2Sender, I shot Didier in Indian Creek
making a first ascent of a 5.13+ crack he named From Switzerland with
Love. Didier threw everything he had at the climb: shoving in a heel
hook above his head to place gear at the crux, risking a fall that would
have landed him on the ledge below. Everybody was cheering him on,
including me. Even Didier began to talk to himself in his exhausted
Swiss-French accent: "Come on Didier!"

I am neurotically aware of how audiences react to each scene of my
movies. When I screened Return2Sender in theaters, Didier's first-ascent
efforts elicited more gasps from the audience than nearly any other
performance did (well, apart from Biscuit the Terrier's paw-scraping
Eldorado dog climbs). In a sport where the stakes are often high, first
ascents raise them even higher: the climber is venturing into unknown
and unpredictable terrain, punching through each move with the
determination of someone out to leave a permanent mark on climbing. Now
that makes good film.

It was only after I set out to make a film about first ascents, however,
that I began to comprehend just how difficult carrying out my vision
could be. After all, today, when generations of ambitious climbers have
already picked off every conceivable route, the opportunities for first
ascents are limited. Attempts of the few lines that are hard or scary or
inaccessible enough to remain unclimbed can drag on for months if not
years, burning through money, patience and sanity. Growing up in
Boulder, I can remember watching hardmen gradually descend into Kurtzian
madness as their interminable projects morphed into dark obsessions.
Actually, that sounds like it could make great film, too—but I don't
have the time or funding to hunker down for in-depth psychological
documentaries. I like to drop in, shoot some thrilling stuff for a week
or two, and move on to the next adventure. The chances of catching a
radical first ascent on such a schedule are dauntingly low.

Berthod in Squamish’s Cirque of the Uncrackables, British Columbia, Canada. The twenty-three-year-old Swiss has distinguished himself as one of the best crack climbers in the world. [Photo] Sonnie Trotter

In Squamish, I'd managed to cobble together a budget for five weeks to
shoot Didier on the Cobra; but of the last twenty days, only five had
been dry. Granted, Didier had made the most of those days, and his
progress on the route was inspiring. With only minimal scoping on
toprope (it's way too steep to hangdog) he had quickly mastered the
lower section—thirty feet of 5.12 stemming and finger jams to a key
rest—and was already bearing down on the crux.

Above the rest, the wall leans out, getting steeper and more burly as it
heads into a bulge, where a stretch of thirty-five feet becomes too hard
to place more than one piece of gear. Didier had devised a Velcro
release on his harness to hold a BD .75 cam for this section. Torquing
from fingertip jams with his left hand, his feet smeared on the rippling
edges of the crack, he would pause for the briefest of moments, rip the
cam from his harness, fire it in, yard up the rope, clip, then lunge for
the next finger lock with his right hand, gasping through clenched teeth
at every jam. To gain the final roof, he shoved his middle finger upside
down into the crack—like a big "Fuck you!" to the limits of modern rock
climbing—cranked up off it and threw himself into a desperate series of
liebacks in the final crux.

Each try, he edged a little higher before taking a forty-foot whipper,
dangling in space and pleading with his forearms, but otherwise
remaining unfazed, ready for another go. It was the sickest crack
climbing I'd ever seen.

Meanwhile, I had my own cruxes to deal with. Shooting the Cobra the way
I usually would—with one camera suspended above the climber for the
close-up on the individual moves, and another "wide shot" that shows the
climber and route together—fails to portray the crack's graceful
steepness. Position is a challenge for climbing videographers; if you've
only got rock to hang from, it's often hard to get out far enough from
the wall to get a good angle. Fortunately, the Cobra is surrounded by
towering evergreens that make perfect rigging anchors. Between them, we
set up a Z-pully system with static ropes that allowed me to hang from a
position—out and left of the climb—that offered the perfect vantage
point for capturing Didier's flow on the cresting face of the Cobra with
one, continuous shot. And as Didier neared the crux, someone on the
ground dragged me toward him on a leash—a slow "pan and pull" that
gradually intensified the action.

As far as movie magic goes, my methods are a far cry from the Wachowski
brothers'. But that's just fine with me; low-budget filmmaking, besides
being nice and cheap, seems to suit the rough-edged, unglamorous
disposition of climbing itself. And I figure that of all the fancy
techniques available to the modern climbing filmmaker, the most
important is to embrace a concept that's often debased in contemporary
entertainment: reality.

Historically, climbing movies were tightly scripted affairs. If I were
making a climbing movie back in the predigital age, Didier and I would
probably shoot on sixteen-millimeter film, which is expensive and thus
used sparingly. We would wait until after he got the Cobra totally
wired, then hold out for a cloudless day, in the "magic hour" of soft
afternoon light, before powdering Didier's face, shooting him on
sections of the route from various angles, and cutting it together into
a seemingly flawless ascent. The climbing films I watched as a kid were
more slick than today's films. In classics like Sentinel: The West Face,
the stentorian narration removed the climbing from the realm of grit and
sweat; Royal Robbins and Yvon Chouinard moved almost too easily up the
granite, never taking falls. It was all solidly PG-13.

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